Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/11/08
Label: Kill Rock Stars

The last couple of years a trend has emerged among American rock bands - the likes of No Age, Crystal Castles, Times New Viking and Deerhunter, all happily wedded to noisy chaos, have begun copping sly feels of pop sweetness only to bury the evidence beneath layers of distortion. Deerhoof don't sound like any of those bands (their three, four minute forays have, until "Offend Maggie", sounded more like scientific experiments than they do No Age) but the basic philosophy remains the same - that of noise imbued with a sense of relevance; dissonance in competition against harmony.

When Deerhoof experiment within their art the dependent variable seems to be Satomi Matsuzaki, the quartet's lead singer and regular bassist. Matsuzaki's voice, childlike in its pitch and stunningly undisturbed by the carousel bluster of the music that flanks her, has been the pop to Deerhoof's noise since she joined the band in 1996. Lacking any classical training whatsoever, Matsuzaki had moved to San Francisco from Tokyo with the intention of studying film - a pair of attributes that must have seemed tempting to Greg Saunier, a classically trained musician and keen conceptualist playing drums in Deerhoof at the time.

Even though Matsuzaki is now the band's regular bass player, that early relationship between Saunier's knowledge and her naivety seems to remain on "Offend Maggie", Deerhoof's 12th album in a 14-year career. Most have put that down to Matsuzaki's channelling of her native pop tongue - the 'J-Pop' that began as '60s homage to American rock'n'roll but still doesn't seemed to have picked up its raunch.

"Offend Maggie" revels in that tease between balls-out western rock and Matsuzaki's playful but resolutely coy vocal patterns, opener "The Tears And Music Of Love" riding a riff that barely shies from that of Free's "Alright Now". On "Snoopy Waves" and "My Purple Past", meanwhile, guitarist John Dieterich sounds like Pete Townshend and "Fresh Born" boasts the clipped guitar chops and bass sleaze of Isaac Hayes' "Shaft".

While at first that combination may jar, it doesn't take long for its merits to transpire. By placing Matsuzaki's soft vocal against stark rock rhythms and off-key mentalist tropes, Deerhoof avoid the dull wash of a band like Asobi Seksi, whose singer Yuki Chikudate shares the J-Pop innocence but is mollycoddled in a blanket of nice-gaze guitar. It's odd and it's testament to the way they master their experiments - but, thanks to Matsuzaki's defiant innocence, in Deerhoof's warped universe a move toward familiar rock traditionalism makes them even more of a perverse proposition.

    by Kev Kharas